Affect, Trust, and Dignity: Ontological Possibilities and Material Consequences for a Philosophy of Educational Resonance Walter Gershon Kent State University
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Walter Gershon 461 Affect, Trust, and Dignity: Ontological Possibilities and Material Consequences for a Philosophy of Educational Resonance Walter Gershon Kent State University INTRODUCTION This essay articulates a philosophy of resonance in education, from some of its theoretical possibilities through their material consequences. Contemporary under- standings in educational philosophy have a tendency to utilize ocular metaphors, epistemological constructions that provide frames for seeing the world. There are at least the following three difficulties with such a reliance on the ocular. First, they are easily interrupted by nonocular metaphors. While this may seem to be a rather surface concern, it points to a deep philosophical set of problems. For example, what happens when the augenblick, a construct around which much philosophizing has been accomplished, is pressed slightly to become a “blink of an ear”?1 This move not only questions the veracity of ocular-centric constructions from blinks to texts — for what does it say about an idea if it falls apart by shifting senses — but it also presses at the feasibility of framing, its inherently bounded nature as well as the large number of possibilities excluded by its gaze. Second, the sonic provides another avenue for wonder. Sound is omnipresent and questions of hearing or listening are as much about physical anatomy as they concern sociocultural constructs about what sounds can mean. Unlike sight that is necessarily directional and constantly interrupted (for example, by blinking), sound is omnidirectional, creating a context in which focus requires a particular kind of attentive filtering rather than a reframing or panning directionality. Finally, sound is and always has been. Mediated, manipulated, lost, and found. Moreover, there is as deep a history of relationships among science, medicine, phi- losophy, and the aural that is often overlooked.2 Reason is not necessarily separate from resonance nor, as scholars in sound studies document, is the sonic apolitical, ahistorical, or otherwise distanced from questions of positionality and power.3 Sound, then can be understood as a strong means for philosophizing. An aspect of experience that has deep ties to the onto-epistemo-genic, from premodern to the post-nexts, that can offer pathways to queering the pitch of everyday understandings. The ideas presented in this essay will undoubtedly seem familiar to those with knowledge of the works of such philosophers as William James, Walter Benjamin, and John Dewey. It will be similarly familiar to those with an interest in non-Western spiritualities and philosophies, understandings that have no need for postmodern, poststructuralist, or current movements of the “post-next,” for there never was the error of constructing false binaries between objects, ideas, ecologies, and the like.4 Where this work breaks new ground is in enunciating what it might mean to construct an educational philosophy around the ear, sound, and music rather than the eye, sight, and visual metaphors. In keeping with the interdisciplinarity of sound PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 2015 | Eduardo Duarte, editor © P2016 H I PhilosophyL O S O P H of Y Education O F E D Society U C A T| IUrbana, O N 2 Illinois0 1 5 462 Affect, Trust, and Dignity philosophizing, this essay draws from multiple fields, each of which are in turn also interdisciplinary: sound studies, sensory studies, affect theory, and curriculum studies, fields that can be understood to reside at the complex nexus of philosophy, social theory, and materiality. Of primary importance are recent discussions about sound, vibration, and resonance, and it is these works that serve as the foundation for most of the arguments made here. These understandings are then dis/placed against interpretations in the social and physical sciences to form an educational philosophy of resonance, possibilities that also speak to questions about contemporary educa- tional policy and practice.5 VIBRATIONAL AFFECT: ONTOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS AT THE INTERSECTION OF PHYSICS, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND SOUND Working from what he characterizes as James’s notion of “pulsed vectors of feeling” and his articulation of Baruch Spinoza’s discussion of movements and “the potential of entities to affect and be affected,” Steve Goodman argues for a “vibration- al ontology,” an understanding that “everything is in motion, is vibrating.”6 To this idea, he adds the Spinozan notion that “a body is, not because it thinks, but because of its power to affect and be affected. And for Spinoza [and more contemporarily Maxine Greene], we do not yet know this power!”7 When placed alongside one an- other, these create a context in which not only the material but also the philosophical and theoretical are vibrating in ways that are constantly and consistently affecting and being affected by everything from ideas to ecologies. This construction echoes not only recent work in anthropology, such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s notion of the generative nature, for better and worse, of affective points of friction8 but also Melissa Greigg and Gergory J. Seigworth’s discussion of affect as emergent “bloom spaces” of possibility.9 That everything is in motion is also an axiom that lies at the core of much of contemporary physics — nothing is still. Such motion has similarly been visualized at the intersection of complexity science and mapping, noted for its queerly somatic possibilities, and the ordinariness of its iteratively recursive nested layers in everyday experience has been sensuously documented. In short, from physics to social science, from the theoretical to the material, there is an understanding in many corners of contemporary thought and practice that all things vibrate. Of equal importance, these vibrations are what Brian Massumi calls “ontogenic,”10 processes of ontology, the movement of the affective. Sound is vibrational, and the limits for its perception are embodied limitations of sensation. In this way, not only does sound interrupt many commonly held phil- osophical constructions, such as the discussion around the augenblick, for there is no blink of an ear,11 but it also disrupts similarly common understandings about both perception and embodiment. There are vibrations that sound both below and above the human range of perception, the aural, the somatic, the intuitive and other aspects of the sensorium.12 Vibration, like sound, “radiates spherically from a sounding source,”13 a ma- terial manifestation that similarly calls into question philosophical understandings that are based on ocular metaphors and visual meanings. For example, as I have P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 1 5 Walter Gershon 463 argued elsewhere,14 the spatial limits for educational transactions are often more aural than visual. These spheres of vibration are literal fields of affect that, like an omnidirectional microphone, simultaneously vibrate and are vibrated by the nested ecologies in which they exist. While this understanding of fields is in many ways not dissimilar from Pierre Bourdieu’s construction of the same name15 — the idea that people are affected by multiple layers of ideas, power, and culture — it is closer to Sherry Ortner’s discussion of agency: the way I envisage social agents, which is that they are always involved in, and can never act outside of, the multiplicity of social relations in which they are enmeshed. Thus while all social actors are assumed to “have” agency, the idea of actors as always being engaged with others in the play of serious games is meant to make it virtually impossible to imagine that the agent is free, or is an unfettered individual.16 On this multiplicity of social relations, Ortner’s construction of agency can take one of two central forms: “enmeshed in relations of (would-be) solidarity” such as “friends, family, kin, spouses or partners … and so forth” or “enmeshed within relations of power, inequality, and competition.”17 This construction of relations and relatedness jives with Tsing’s construction of global connections as productive, though not necessarily positive, frictions, the moments when one group is affected by another’s affects and vice versa: “Instead of starting with the dichotomy between global force and local response, these methods show the importance of contingent and botched encounters in shaping both busi- ness-as-usual and its radical refusals…. Such fragments of varied schemes and travels and encounters do create a world of global connections.”18 Similarly, as with aspects of John Dewey’s (and Arthur Bentley’s) discussion of transaction,19 and contemporary notions of physics, if everything vibrates than no-thing is unconnected or can be successfully decoupled from another. The difficulty with transaction, unlike Tsing’s self-proclaimed poetically ethnographic study of destruction, is that there is largely not a politics (read: power and relations) of transaction. In addition, although both transaction and friction are certainly affective and sensual, both are often grounded in the ocular, and transaction more so than friction. What construct, then, might encompass the wide range of possibilities of an ontology of vibrational affect? The answer that I propose here, and the one around which this essay is constructed, is the same that is used in sound studies, social theory, philosophy, social science, and the sciences: resonance. ON RESONANCE: POSSIBILITIES BEYOND CONSONANCE, DISSONANCE, AND RELEVANCE As I have written elsewhere, if everything vibrates, then everything resonates. Resonance is produced by the oscillation of vibration, the peaks and valleys of something in and out of phase with itself and its surrounding nested layers of ecol- ogy. According to this understanding of resonance, everything has an iterative and recursive relationship at some level to itself and things not-itself. Rephrased slight- ly, every-thing resonates with itself and other kinds of things in ways that, while not predictive, are usually patterned, patterns that are in turn repeated so that they might be recognizable in kind.